Software Asset Management
Don’t be fooled: SAM requires more than a workflow
In the world of hybrid IT, determining your actual license position requires deep knowledge of how products are licensed based on metrics such as cores, clusters, availability and BYOSL rules. Flexera One’s Software Asset Management platform surpasses simple workflows with intelligent product use rights and algorithms that automate the calculation of your license position—even for the most daunting software from your strategic vendors like Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Oracle and Salesforce. Now you’ll have the insights you need to save costs on software and reduce your risk of audit exposure.
We were using the supposedly free SAM solution from our ITSM provider, we thought it was good enough. Then one of our larger vendors executed their right to audit their products. To get into compliance, their third-party auditor said we were going to have to pay a 9-figure amount of money. Unfortunately, we were not in a position to defend against that. We executed an RFP and POC and Flexera was by far the leader in the space.
We worked very closely with Flexera and our implementation partner. We had VERY good buy-in from our senior management all the way up to the CEO. In five months, we implemented Flexera and produced the ELP. The ELP showed we were fully compliant and didn’t need to use the settlement catalog that was so generously offered to us.
Sr Vice President, IT asset lifecycle management Insurance industry
Benefits
Save up to 30 percent with a better software license management tool
- Automate effective license positions (ELP) using Flexera One’s large entitlement library with more than 450,000 applications providing product use rights, metrics and license types
- Manage consumption as you bring your own software licenses (BYOSL) to the cloud or containers
- Strategically optimize key vendor relationships and contracts to improve business outcomes
- Maximize the value of your software portfolio so you can redirect savings towards strategic initiatives
- Reveal the nexus of your contractual, organizational, usage and inventory data so you understand software usage and its associated business value
- Share transformational technology insights by integrating with procurement, ITSM, ITFM and other business systems in your ecosystem
- Certified replacement for IBM’s License Metric Tool (ILMT)
Success story
Brewing better IT visibility for a global beer giant
Carlsberg’s ITAM team faced several obstacles from a lack of visibility into its global IT assets, including challenges with planning, financial transparency and baseline, risk in legal compliance and incomplete entitlement data.
Within the first year,
Carlsberg saved over $400,000
in maintenance, running costs, support fees and license costs
Featured details
Reduce waste and gain greater control
Optimize, reconcile and recognize your software across your entire landscape
Identify entitlements with rich intelligence
Prebuilt integrations into procurement suites, software reseller and vendor data give you the ability to quickly catalog your entitlements. Flexera’s SKU library adds rich intelligence to unravel the complexity of entitlements by automatically identifying the license metric, use rights and applications covered by every purchase.
Recognize software without manual effort
Process inventory data automatically through Flexera’s Application Recognition Library, which translates raw inventory into commercially available product titles. Flexera integrates with existing inventory solutions like Microsoft, ServiceNow, IBM and BMC to collect software evidence. Best of all, you don’t need to manually create software models or counters.
Automatically reconcile entitlement and consumption data
Deriving an effective license position is a complicated math exercise that requires deep knowledge of how to count every installation of every software title based on the license metrics. Flexera One’s advanced license reconciliation algorithms do the hard math for you. Flexera One quickly gives you insights into the risks and costs for all your software installed in physical, virtual, containers, IaaS or PaaS environments so you can stop counting and start strategizing.
Optimize software contracts to reduce waste
Flexera One’s product use rights library automatically optimizes your software portfolio by applying product use rights such as upgrade, downgrade, second use, non-production, active/passive cluster, virtual and hybrid use rights. Flexera One specializes in optimizing the applications that cost you millions, such as Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Websphere, IBM Cloud Paks, Oracle Database, Oracle Middleware, VMWare and SAP.
Transform audits from disruptions into seamless day-to-day processes
On average, organizations experience 2.3 audits in a 3-year period. With Flexera One, you can transform regulatory and vendor audits from a major disruption into a seamless business-as-usual process. You'll remain in continual compliance and be armed with effective license positions across all your software vendors. Now you can dominate software audits, attestations, true-ups and software maintenance renewals.
The industry standard for leading software vendors
Flexera One ITAM is the only solution that can be used in lieu of IBM’s License Metric Tool (ILMT). As part of Flexera’s partnership with IBM, Flexera One ITAM has full and exclusive access to IBM’s product catalog containing over 5,000 IBM products. We’re using the IBM catalog for the purposes of enriching our own libraries which ensures 100% accuracy when inventorying and recognizing IBM products through Flexera One ITAM. Other SAM providers must import from ILMT for IBM licensing.
IT asset management capabilities
IT Asset Management that makes the exponential manageable
Obtain a clear SaaS picture to rein in spend
ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workday, Microsoft. What if you could shave off even a few percentage points from your SaaS costs for all of them? With Flexera One, you get a current and complete picture of SaaS usage to support your business stakeholders while optimizing SaaS spend with all your vendors. Flexera One enables you to take action by discovering shadow SaaS, removing redundant applications and optimizing subscriptions based on actual usage automatically.
Optimize software from on-prem to cloud
Your software portfolio is quickly expanding into private and public clouds with BYOSL. At the same time, Microsoft is creating hybrid use rights and IBM is offering Cloud Paks. And we thought capacity-based licensing in the data center was hard. You need more than a workflow to optimize your software spend and mitigate audit risks—that’s where Flexera One comes in. Unlike other software asset management tools out there, Flexera One is the only SAM solution to solve the exponentiality of licensing. It possesses the depth, breadth, algorithms and automation required to truly create a trusted and accurate license position.
Establish the guardrails for automated governance
Your employees are a click and a credit card charge away from bringing new technologies into your business. With Flexera One’s capabilities, you can proactively reduce the sprawl and provide end users with a catalog of approved software, SaaS and cloud instances–helping you get them within guard rails while enabling the business to be agile and innovative. If they aren’t using what they buy, you can reclaim it to avoid future costs. And Flexera One integrates with ITSM providers so you can meet users where they are and provide a seamless end-user experience.
Maximize your hardware investments no matter where they are
The remote workforce brought on new challenges and amplified the need for hardware asset management. Flexera Ones helps you make critical hardware lifecycle decisions to support user productivity, business continuity and make the most of your hardware investments. Enabling you to manage the hardware you own or lease, no matter where it is.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Where SAM practices expect to increase focus the next three years
73%
SaaS solutions
68%
Use of public cloud
59%
Use of private/hybrid cloud
*Figures have been rounded to the nearest integer.
